2015, the 50th anniversary of the start of US direct combat
operations in Vietnam.

What’s at stake:

During the
Vietnam War and even after the catastrophe, too many officials, educators,
media, pundits, because they were uninformed and uncritical, failed to provide
present and future generations “the critical skills needed for informed dissent
and empowered citizenship in a democracy,” resulting in a pliable populace and
prolonged state of war. “This militaristic
state ‘is so ingrained in American
institutions…so totalitarian—that the government is practically unthinkable
without it.’ This war mentality
influences every social institution and emphasizes ‘secrecy not candor, propaganda
not information.’”

“In May 2012, President Barack Obama and the Pentagon announced a Commemoration
of the Vietnam War to continue through 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the
conflict’s end. . . .The Commemoration will sponsor thousands of activities
over the next ten years, including concerts, educational curricula, school
visits by veterans, symposia, school projects, memorial festivities, and
POW/MIA ceremonies.” Marciano, The
American War in Vietnam (14-15, 9).

To the Pentagon, former President Obama, and
President Trump:Don’t whitewash
this war. We must not forget how
atrocious was this war, its massive destruction and suffering for no good
purpose. The Warriors are trying to
turn it into part of US patriotic history.
Let us instead seek the truth about the war—and all the other US wars of
aggression since WWII.

See OMNI’s Westward, Pacific/E. Asia
Empire Newsletters, now all in US Imperialism newsletters. Here is the latest: US Imperialism Newsletter #35 (consolidating
Imperialism and Westward Imperialism newsletter).

All wars are fought twice, the first
time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the bestselling
novel The Sympathizer comes a
searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and
Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective
memory of both nations.

From a
kaleidoscope of cultural forms—novels, memoirs, cemeteries, monuments, films,
photography, museum exhibits, video games, souvenirs, and more—Nothing Ever Dies brings a comprehensive
vision of the war into sharp focus. At stake are ethical questions about how
the war should be remembered by participants that include not only Americans
and Vietnamese but also Laotians, Cambodians, South Koreans, and Southeast
Asian Americans. Too often, memorials valorize the experience of one’s own
people above all else, honoring their sacrifices while demonizing the
“enemy”—or, most often, ignoring combatants and civilians on the other side
altogether. Visiting sites across the United States, Southeast Asia, and Korea,
Viet Thanh Nguyen provides penetrating interpretations of the way memories of the war help to enable future wars or struggle to
prevent them.

Drawing from
this war, Nguyen offers a lesson for all wars by calling on us to recognize not
only our shared humanity but our ever-present inhumanity. This is the only path
to reconciliation with our foes, and with ourselves. Without reconciliation,
war’s truth will be impossible to remember, and war’s trauma impossible to
forget.

RELATED LINKS

Read Literary
Hub’s interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen on Nothing
Ever Dies, his 2016 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer, and how to broaden the way Americans think about
Vietnam

Read a Los Angeles Review of Books interview
with Nguyen

Read excerpts
from Nothing Ever Dies at The
American Scholar and Literary Hub

Read a Bustle
profile of Nguyen

Read a
discussion with Nguyen in the Charlottesville, VA, Daily Progress

Visit Nguyen’s
website

PBS: This September a National Conversation on the Vietnam
War

THE VIETNAM WAR, the 10-part, 18-hour documentary film series
directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, will air in September 2017 on PBS
stations. Its
creators are promoting it as intended to "spark thought, questions and
debate around one of the most transformative periods in modern American
history."

"The film will be accompanied by an unprecedented outreach
and public engagement program, providing opportunities ­ facilitated by public
television stations ­for communities to participate in a national conversation
about what happened during the Vietnam War, what went wrong and what lessons
are to be learned. In addition, there will be a robust interactive website and
an educational initiative designed to engage teachers and students through
multiple platforms, including PBS LearningMedia."

1) Contact
your local PBS station and offer your experience during the Vietnam
War era and/or your knowledge of post-war legacies if they are facilitating
community conversations.

2) Create
viewing parties in local colleges, high schools, religious
institutions, public libraries, neighborhood centers or homes to share personal
stories among members of the Vietnam and later generations. Use Facebook
and other social media for outreach and recruitment.

[This appears to be an attempt to
present a comprehensive, balanced report.
Would be nice to have such a large study available to the general public
to help counteract the Pentagon/Obama/Trump Propaganda Machine. Send me your opinions and reviews you think
should be read. –Dick]

MORE FILMS

A review of 2 films
1970 and 2012 byMichael Grigsby
on impact of VNW on troops, in Peace
In Our Times, Veterans For Peace magazine (Fall 2014). The producers
hope the 2nd film especially will be shown from 2015, the 50th anniversary of
the start of the US invasion and as part of VFP's ongoing Full Disclosure Campaign against Pentagon's VNW
whitewashing. –Dick

Combat veteran Tim Keenan has feared his return to Vietnam for
over 40 years. Until Now. Naneek captures Tim’s emotional journey as he meets
with former enemies, revisits the battleground of Dak To, and confronts a past
he’s been unable to overcome. Most
important, you hear the other side of the story through the eyes of 5 North
Vietnamese Army Soldiers.

If anyone would like to
donate to the work of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 50, feel free to email
naneekfilm@gmail.com - Tim and Neal

Audience Award Best
Documentary Short - Traverse City Film Festival
Honorable Mention for Best Documentary Short - Woodstock Film Festival

WE SHOULD MAKE
NICK TURSE an honorary baby boomer for writing Kill Anything That Moves. A
history of the Vietnam War that finds the My Lai massacre more the rule than
the exception, this book is almost guaranteed to reveal something that will
drop your jaw — at least once. For me, it was the number of American military
helicopter sorties flown during the Vietnam War: over 36 million. Filled with
such shocking details, Kill Anything That
Moves will shake you with a deeper understanding of the serial atrocity
that was the US war effort in Vietnam.

Though under
40, Turse has written just the sort of book we might have hoped to get from
more baby boomers as they entered their autobiographical years. Say what you
will about whether those who lived through World War II merit the title of this
country’s “Greatest Generation”; they have, at the least, proven themselves
America’s greatest memoir-writing generation. Never before have so many stepped
forward to tell their truths, the stories of man’s inhumanity to man that they
witnessed during the Holocaust and the Second World War. Which makes the
relative scarcity of public reflection on the Vietnam War all the more
striking, especially given all the shouting it inspired at the time.

Yes, the war
looms large in collective memory — as the great alienation engine of the 1960s
back in the US. But Turse’s book reminds us that the primary “tragedy of Vietnam”
was not that America somehow “lost its way” in fighting an ill-advised war but
rather that the war itself was a series of criminal acts perpetrated by the US
government on the Vietnamese people. My characterization may sound strident to
many today. Most Americans at the time certainly would have disagreed with it.
Yet as the war dragged on, the number who recognized the war’s criminality grew
inexorably. If you don’t already know the reason, Kill Anything That Moves will
show you. And if you already do, this book will remind you why we must never
forget what our country did to Vietnam.

Before the baby
boomers became the “Vietnam War Generation,” we might say that they had grown
up as the “Nuremberg Generation.” The 1947 Nuremberg Nazi War Crimes Trials
created something of a new world order — no longer would “just following
orders” render you innocent of a war crime, nor would obeying the dogma of “my
country, right or wrong.” Now, it seemed that it was a people’s right — perhaps
even its responsibility — to oppose its government if that government pursued
an unjust war. Even silence could be criminal. When the US government then
tried to conduct the Vietnam War using draftees drawn from a generation that
had grown up hearing these new rules, it encountered unprecedented
difficulties.

Yet, so far as
American public opinion on the Vietnam War went, the Nuremberg Trials may
ultimately have proven something of a double-edged sword in the sense that the
enormity of the Nazi crimes confronted in those hearings may have desensitized
us to the horrors that came in later years. Could anything really shock us
after Auschwitz? Perhaps not, but Kill Anything That Moves overwhelmingly
argues that outrage is still possible — and necessary.

To fully
appreciate the Vietnam War, we must first clear up any misperception that it
was some kind of fair fight between Vietnamese, with the US helping one side
and the Soviet Union and China helping the other. Turse’s book does so in many
ways: There’s the fact that “our side” — American and South Vietnamese
government forces — used 128,400 tons of ammunition a month in 1970, while the
“other side” — the National Liberation Front (NLF), or “Viet Cong,” and the
North Vietnamese government — never fired more than 1,000 tons a month. Or that
the US dropped 32 tons of bombs per hour on North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968,
causing some to predict it would become the most bombed country in world
history.

This prediction
proved wrong, Turse points out. It was South Vietnam, our ally, that became the
most bombed country in history as “US and South Vietnamese aircraft flew 3.4
million combat sorties in Southeast Asia,” during which they dropped “the
equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.” The “other side,” remember,
never launched an aerial bombing run. “Our side” subjected 12 million acres to
saturation bombing and dropped 70 million liters of herbicide (notably Agent
Orange). One of the war images that lives on is that of a naked nine-year old
Phan Thi Kim Phúc running down a road after having been napalmed by our South
Vietnamese allies in 1972. (“Our side” dropped 400,000 tons of napalm in
Southeast Asia.) Though Kim Phúc survived, a low-end estimate of the number of
Vietnamese civilians who did not would be 250,000. By 1968, a US Senate study
had put the number of civilians killed or wounded in free fire zones at
300,000. Free fire zones, as Turse reports in an infantryman’s words, meant
that “everyone, men, women, children, could be considered [a fair target]; you
could not be held responsible for firing on innocent civilians since by
definition there were none there.”

Indeed, an
American advisor reported in 1970:

[I] have
medivaced enough elderly people and children to firmly believe that the
percentage of Viet Cong killed by support assets is equal to the percentage of
Viet Cong in the population. That is, if 8% of the population [of] an area is
VC about 8% of the people we kill are VC.

In 1995, the
Vietnamese government (i.e., the “other side,” which won the war) put the number
of war dead at 3 million, 2 million of them civilians; a 2008 Harvard Medical
School/University of Washington research study produced even higher figures.
(The population of South Vietnam was about 19 million.) Obviously nothing
comparable happened in the United States.

However, no one
came away from the war unfamiliar with the killing of Vietnamese civilians, if
only due to the public exposure of the March 15, 1968 My Lai massacre, where
American troops murdered an entire village of 300–500 unarmed South Vietnamese,
in addition to raping civilians, killing their livestock, mutilating corpses,
burning down houses, and fouling drinking water. (In the official record, the
Americans recorded killing 128 enemy troops and suffering no casualties.) But
where My Lai, Turse writes, “has entered the popular American consciousness as
an exceptional, one-of-a-kind event,” his investigation caused him to see “the
indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants” as “neither
accidental nor unforeseeable.”

For Turse, a
journalist and the author of a previous book on the military industrial
complex’s impact on daily life, the first glimmer of understanding came in 2001
when, as a graduate student researching post-traumatic stress disorder among
Vietnam veterans, he happened upon the records of the Vietnam War Crimes
Working Group. This was “a secret Pentagon task force that had,” he writes,
“been assembled after the My Lai massacre to ensure that the army would never
again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” The papers
“documented a nightmare war that is essentially missing from our understanding
of the Vietnam conflict.”

In this book,
the devil is truly in the details. There were, for instance, the military units
placed in kill-count competition so that, one soldier recalled, “as you passed
through the chow line you were able to look up at a chart and see that we had
killed so many.” How to decide if a corpse was Viet Cong, and thus merited a
chow line check mark? As the saying went, “If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese,
it’s VC.” (This expansive sense of the enemy was a Western tradition: when the
French fought the Viet Minh (a predecessor organization to the Viet Cong), a
French lieutenant once asked, “What is a Viet Minh – A Viet Minh? He is a dead Vietnamese.”)
Turse writes, “The purest expression of the effect of the rules of engagement I
ever found was on the death certificate of Nguyen Mai, an unarmed Vietnamese
man who died ‘from a penetrating wound’ to the face.” The certificate listed
the “external caus[e]” of death as “Running from US forces.” As Ron Ridenhour,
the soldier who gathered the details of the My Lai massacre, said 25 years
later, My Lai “was an operation, not an aberration.”

There were also
the Zippo squads — the men who set thatched houses on fire with cigarette
lighters when the military ordered the peasant population to move out because
there were Viet Cong in the neighborhood. If this doesn’t strike you as the
most brilliant way to win the Vietnamese “hearts and minds” our government told
us it was striving for, you’re not alone. Turse cites a 1970 refugee study in
one province where 80 percent blamed their homelessness on US and allied South
Vietnamese government forces, 18 percent attributed the damage to actual
battles between the two sides, and only 2 percent blamed the NLF alone. This
assessment was backed up by John Paul Vann, head of the US’s Saigon-area
“pacification” program, who wrote in 1968 that “I estimate 15,000 houses
destroyed — about 99 percent of this has been the result of overreaction on the
part of US and [South] Vietnamese units.” Overreaction.

Another of
Turse’s interesting finds is an official army investigation of the “Torture of
Prisoners of War by US Officers,” which concluded that such torture was “standard
practice” among US troops. And the study Defense Secretary William McNamara
commissioned in 1969 that found more “than 96 percent of Marine Corps second
lieutenants […] surveyed […] indicated that they would resort to torture to
obtain information.” Turse concludes:

For the
Vietnamese, the American War was an endless gauntlet of potential calamities.
Killed for the sake of a bounty or shot in a garbage dump, forced into
prostitution or gang-raped by GIs, run down for sport on a roadway or locked
away in jail to be tortured without the benefit of a trial — the range of
disasters was nearly endless.

Not everyone
was unaware of these monstrosities at the time. When the My Lai story surfaced
in late 1969, Nixon’s White House advisors feared the case might “develop into
a major trial almost of the Nuremberg scope and could have a major effect on
public opinion.” In 1971, retired army general Telford Taylor, chief
prosecution counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, raised the precedent of Japanese
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who was executed in 1946 after an American military
tribunal found him guilty of failing to prevent atrocities by his troops — even
though he had lost contact with the troops at the time the crimes were
committed. Taylor suggested that General William Westmoreland, commander of US
forces in Vietnam, might be in a similar situation given what had occurred on
his watch.

(Westmoreland
once told a filmmaker: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as
does the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient. As the
philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” Damning as this
opinion may sound now, it was well within mainstream discussion at the time.
There were definitely Americans who thought that the huge numbers of Vietnamese
that forced us to kill them — by not surrendering — was evidence of a general
Asian lack of respect for the value of human life.)

But the
administration managed to contain the fallout, with no convictions of anyone
higher ranking than Lieutenant William Calley. In 1968, in terms of press
coverage, even Ramparts, arguably the most radical mass-market publication in
the nation, refused to run a war-crime story by a veteran who had witnessed the
crime. But after My Lai became public knowledge, Turse asserts: “It was almost
as if America’s leading media outlets had gone straight from ignoring
atrocities to treating them as old news.” In 1972, Newsweek’s departing Saigon
bureau chief filed a story about an operation called “Speedy Express,” in which
he concluded that “thousands of unarmed, noncombatant civilians have been
killed by American firepower. They were not killed by accident. The American
way of fighting made their deaths inevitable.” His editors, however, argued
that running the story would constitute a “gratuitous attack” upon the Nixon
Administration, which had just taken such a hit over My Lai.

Henry Kissinger
once told Richard Nixon, “Once we’ve broken the war, no one will care about war
crimes.” And as the US turned the bulk of the war over to its South Vietnamese
government allies to lose, Kissinger proved right. In the tremendous research
effort that produced this book (including many interviews of Vietnamese and
American soldiers), Turse finds that, “The scale of the suffering becomes
almost unimaginable,” but not as “unimaginable as the fact that somehow, in the
United States it was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out
of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.”

We will almost
certainly never see an outpouring of truth-telling about Vietnam approaching
that of the Second World War era for the simple reason that “we” were not on
the side of the angels in Vietnam. But this only makes Turse’s work all the
more significant.

AMERICAN RECKONING: THE VIETNAM WAR AND OUR NATIONAL IDENTITY
by Christian Appy. Viking, 2015. Review by Blogger Doug Anderson in MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW.

Christian Appy's new book, American Reckoning, is a brilliant and readable synthesis of all previous thinking about
the Vietnam War plus deep insights into the inner workings of the powers
behind the war, especially what the American people were not privy to at the
time. The war had gone sour for LBJ and key members of his administration long
before anybody knew about it. The war had become unwinnable but simultaneously
unendable.

Appy recounts a moment when Lyndon Johnson, badgered by
reporters to explain why we continued to fight a war that was plainly
unwinnable, “the president unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ,
and declared, ‘This is why.’” This was typical of LBJ’s Aristophanic
self-expression but it was also a metaphor Freud would have loved—revealing
what American power thought of itself and its assumed place in the world.
Johnson and his key players thought that a withdrawal from Vietnam would signal
weakness to the rest of the world.

Appy is particularly astute about Vietnam Veterans, a
demographic still largely misunderstood by the American public. All combat
troops, whatever their politics, had the following experience. They were taught
to believe that we were fighting a noble war to prevent the innocent South
Vietnamese from being overrun by the godless communist hoards from the north.
They arrived in country and quickly discovered that the Vietnamese civilians
were in on the game. True, many Vietnamese, especially those who remembered the
French, merely wanted to be left alone by both sides, but eighty percent of the
country was pro-NLF. When Diem, the president we had installed in Saigon
realized this, he canceled elections. This structural oversight on the part of
the war's architects was responsible for a lot of dead Americans and
Vietnamese.

Ground troops were continually walking into ambushes and
stepping on mines in close proximity to villages and were quick to assume that
the villagers knew about the mines and the enemy presence. If a farmer walks over the same paddy dike
for a week and doesn't step on the mine and then an American does, soldiers and
marines assumed the villagers were working for the enemy. Often, they were. In
any case, by the time I arrived in Vietnam in 1967 the hostility toward the
Vietnamese in general was extreme. The war became a matter of staying alive for
American ground troops and any notions of a noble cause had flown. The
reprisals against the civilian population were often fierce.

Most of the American servicemen in Vietnam were decent human
beings who had inherited their military service identity from their World War
II-generation parents, a belief that the US was the world's eternal good guy
always doing the right thing and helping out the underdog. We had stopped Tojo
and Hitler, after all. The fall from grace of this generation of men was to
have devastating consequences. The My Lai massacre brought attention to the
problem of civilian casualties and revealed that it wasn't only mass killings
like My Lai: the brutal treatment of civilians was a daily occurrence.

The next nightmare was the relocation of entire village
populations to large camps called "strategic hamlets," and the
chemical defoliation of known enemy sanctuaries that became known as "free
fire zones." The affects of these relocations and the chemical spraying
destroyed most of the rice crop and mid-war, Vietnam, known for its rice, was
having to import it. Appy's tracking of the stages of the continuing disaster
is quite convincing: idiocy after idiocy, bungle after bungle, all the way to
"Vietnamization" and the ignominious exit of the Americans in 1975.

Appy follows the troops home to their dismal reception.
Incidents of returning soldiers being spit on and called baby killers were very
rare. What most troops faced was indifference, disgust or embarrassment. In some
cases they were literally shunned. They
were not welcomed. They were further
stigmatized as drug addicts and psychopaths.
For a while during the seventies every time a television series needed a
psycho they created a character that was a Vietnam veteran.

After the initial shaming of homecoming troops, Ronald Reagan
and his administration tried to resuscitate them as victims. The memory of the
war had sufficiently subsided enough for veterans to be recast as men who, if
they had been allowed to fight the war, if they hadn't been undermined by
student protests, would have won. Most veterans rejected both roles—loser or
hero—and watched in amazement while they were reconstructed for political
purposes.

The American right has been trying to make Vietnam go away
for nearly a half century. The week
after the first invasion of Iraq in 1991, George H. W. Bush declared that the
"Vietnam Syndrome" was over.
The slick media packaging of the invasion with lots of exploding
ordnance was meant to kick off a new era in which the US would be restored to
its position as supreme power. Bush the
Second began two wars that were supposed to kick the ball further down
field. In both cases, they failed, and
Vietnam, is still very much with us.

The Vietnam War was an opportunity for the US to question and
revise its national identity in ways that could have avoided much of the
violence that continues now in the Middle East. With the swing toward the right
since Reagan it has done the opposite, and the GOP in particular has become
downright arterially sclerotic in its insistence that the country be restored
to its pre Vietnam idea of itself. That will never happen, and they just
continue to dig the grave deeper.

Appy has subsumed most of the previous books—from Michael Herr's
Dispatches to Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, to Neil Sheehan's A Bright and Shining Lie—into a
brilliant analysis of a war doomed from the get-go. He has exhaustively
interviewed people, dug around in the Library of Congress, and woven it all
into a vigorous and gracefully written argument. Let's hope he finds an
audience beyond the well-preached-to choir. A joke-meme is gathering momentum
online, sometimes appearing as a cartoon, with the following caption: “Those
who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do study history
are doomed to sit around and watch other people repeat it.”

Doug Anderson is the author of the memoir Keep Your Head
Down, as well as several collections of poetry, including The Moon Reflected
Fire. His poem "Seventy" appears in the current issue of MR.

[Also see the excellent review by Bill Griffin
in The Catholic Worker (June-July
2015). I wasn’t able to find
it online in order to forward to you.
The book “focuses on US imperialism in the post Second World War era and
the civic religion of American exceptionalism,” which Appy exposes as “a
dangerous myth.”]

THE ATROCITIES

48th Anniversary of Mai Lai Massacre, VFP E-News, March 11, 2016
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/,
by Jack
Doxey, Vietnam veteran and member of VFP,
Hugh Thompson Chapter 91 in San Diego CA. Doxey reflects on the day Hugh Thompson intervened
in the slaughtering of innocent My Lai villagers.

March 16th 2016 marks
the 48th anniversary of the Vietnam My Lai Massacre. To say that it was a sad
day in the history of our country is a gross understatement. Our United States
military systematically slaughtered over 500 Vietnamese women, children,
infants and old men in the tiny village of My Lai.

VFP Viet Nam Tour - The life
threatening birth defects of Vietnam's children

This
is a hard video to watch, but it shows one of the issues that the March
5-21, 2017 VFP tour to Viet Nam always includes. This will be the last
& 6th VFP annual tour to VN.

TOUR
FLYER ATTACHED- Nadya

From: Chuck Searcy <chuckusvn@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 2:51 AM
Subject: The life threatening birth defects of Vietnam's children
To: Chuck Searcy <chuckusvn@gmail.com>
Thanks to Carter Sio I saw this 2.5-min. video for the first time, from Channel
4 News, entitled "The life threatening birth defects of Vietnam's
children." It can be seen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70N66iwx1To.

More than 5,700 Facebook comments to the video indicate the pain
and sympathy that most people feel for these children, and anger at the
injustice of their plight.

My comment, for those who don't use Facebook, was this:

Thanks Carter, I
had not seen this video. It's an accurate portrayal of the harsh reality, very
sad to witness, at Tu Du Hospital and other institutions. Yet that's only a
small piece of a much bigger silent picture, hidden in the homes of Vietnamese
families who are caring for two, three or more severely disabled children.. Dr.
Phuong is now retired from Tu Du Hospital but continues her mission as Vice
President of the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). She is
one of the heroes and pioneers in this work, bringing the issue to the
attention of the world, many years ago. Of course increased awareness and
knowledge, and vast amounts of sympathy and good will, do not translate into
effective action by the U.S. government and certainly not to any remorse at
all, or responsibility or accountability, from the chemical companies that made
Agent Orange and other poisons. Belatedly, after four decades, the U.S.
government has increased its support in Viet Nam to people with disabilities,
assuming that some of that assistance will reach victims of Agent Orange. There
needs to be a more comprehensive strategy making better use of capable
Vietnamese institutions with people and resources that need more funding and
support to do the job. Generations after the first use of Agent Orange, these
Vietnamese families still need help. And we don't know how long this tragic
consequence of the war will continue to shadow Viet Nam. At least, after years
of political struggle and litigation, American veterans exposed to Agent Orange
are getting some assistance from the U.S. government. We have a moral
obligation to do more for the Vietnamese.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a
Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past
president of TransAfrica Forum, and national board member of the “Vietnam
Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign.” Follow him on Facebook
and www.billfletcherjr.com.

In a 2009 visit to Vietnam I
asked a retired colonel in the Vietnam People’s Army about the notorious
toxin “Agent Orange.” The colonel, who was also a former leader in a
Vietnamese advocacy group for Agent Orange’s victims, spoke fluent English
and was a veteran of the war with the United States. I asked him when had the
Vietnamese realized the long-term dangers associated with the Agent Orange
herbicide used by the U.S.A. His answer was as simple as it was
heart-wrenching: ”When the children were born,” was his response.

In an effort to defeat the
National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese Army (the Vietnam People’s
Army), the U.S. concocted the idea that if it destroyed the forests and
jungles that there would be nowhere for the guerrillas to hide. They, thus,
unleashed a massive defoliation campaign, the results of which exist with us
to this day. Approximately 19 million gallons of herbicides were used during
the war, affecting between 2 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese, along with
thousands of US military personnel. Additionally, Laos and Cambodia were
exposed to Agent Orange by the USA in the larger Indochina War.

Despite the original public
relations associated with the use of Agent Orange aimed at making it appear
safe and humane, it was chemical warfare and it is not an exaggeration to
suggest that it was genocidal. The cancers promoted by Agent Orange
(affecting the Vietnamese colonel I interviewed, as a matter of fact) along
with the catastrophic rise in birth defects, have not only haunted the people
of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but also the United States. Those in the US
military involved in the dispersal of Agent Orange, and those who were simply
exposed to it, brought the curse home.

The United States government
has refused to take responsibility for the war of aggression it waged against
the Vietnamese. This includes a failure to acknowledge the extent of the
devastation wrought by Agent Orange. Ironically, it has also failed to assume
responsibility for the totality of the horror as it affected U.S. veterans,
thus leaving the veterans and their families to too often fight this demon
alone.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee
recently introduced House Resolution 2519, “To direct the Secretary of State,
the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Secretary of Veterans
Affairs to provide assistance for individuals affected by exposure to Agent
Orange, and for other purposes.” In many respects, this bill is about
settling some of the accounts associated with the war against Vietnam. The
U.S.] reneged on reparations that it promised to Vietnam and to this day
there remain those in the media and government who wish to whitewash this
horrendous war of aggression as if it were some sort of misconstrued moral
crusade.

HR 2519 takes us one step
towards accepting responsibility for a war crime that was perpetrated against
the Vietnamese and that, literally and figuratively, blew back in our faces
as our government desperately tried to crush an opponent it should never have
first been fighting. For that reason, we need Congress to pass and fund HR
2519. HR 2519 should be understood as a down payment on a much larger bill
owed to the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and to the US veterans
sent into hell.

[For more information on HR
2519 and the issue of Agent Orange, contact the "Vietnam Agent Orange
Relief & Responsibility Campaign" at www.vn-agentorange.org.]

From Japan to Vietnam, Radiation
and Agent Orange Survivors Deserve Justice From the U.S. by Marjorie Cohn,
VFP Advisory Board Member. Friday, August 21, 2015.

We
have just marked anniversaries of the war crimes and crimes against humanity
committed by the US government against the people of Japan and Vietnam. Seventy
years ago, on August 6, 1945, the U.S. military unleashed an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, killing at least 140,000 people. Three days later, the United States
dropped a second bomb, on Nagasaki, which killed 70,000. And 54 years ago, on
August 10, 1961, the US military began spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam. It
contained the deadly chemical dioxin, which has poisoned an estimated 3 million
people throughout that country. <More>

THE PERPS: THE US WARRIORS WHO STARTED THE BOMBING, SPRAYING,
BURNING, SHOOTING, TORTURING AND KEPT IT UP 10 YEARS

HENRY KISSINGER

(Credit:
Reuters/Pascal Lauener) This post originally appeared at TomDispatch.com Nixon introduced us to permanent,
extrajudicial war in Southeast Asia, and it continues today in the Middle East. GREG GRANDIN, TOMDISPATCH.COM

Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of
America’s Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin Review
by Howie Machtinger In his important new book, Kissinger’s Shadow, NYU
Professor Greg Grandin joins the ranks of

VIETNAM WAR AS PART OF US WARS OF AGGRESSION
INSEPARABLE FROM US HISTORY

American
History 101
Simply Google on your computer:
” History of U.S. Military Interventions
Around The World.”
The machine gun belt of countries
goes from Wounded Knee in 1890,
to the present war in Syria.
There is enough information here to choke a horse.
It has never stopped.
You do not bring the enemy to the
peace table by just killing military
combatants.
You ultimately bring the enemy to
the peace table by killing innocent
civilians.
They are military targets.
This strategy is as old as warfare itself.

During
World War II, 1.1 million people
were murdered at Auschwitz.
During the war, the Allied Forces made no attempt
to bomb the train tracks that led to these death camps.
They had other priorities.
There are only so many chairs around a dinner table.
On March 9-10, 1945, the United States unmercifully
bombed Tokyo, Japan with a new weapon called,
NAPALM.
According to General Curtis LeMay, who was the commander
of the B29s that were responsible for the bombing, he later
said, ” We scorched and boiled and baked to death more
people in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, than went up
in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
There are only so many chairs around a dinner table.

On August 6, and August 9, 1945,
the world changed forever.
On July 16, 1945, the first test of the atom bomb was carried
out in New Mexico.
The very next day, 70 of the scientists who made the bomb
possible sent a petition to President Truman pleading with
him to not use the bomb without first warning Japan.
The letter was delivered to the military, but the letter was
never delivered to Truman.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8:10AM,
an hallucinogenic madness of murder incinerated
Hiroshima, Japan.
100,000 people, ( 95,000 of them civilians ),
died instantly.
Another 100,000 died from the slow death of radiation.
Absolutely no language in human history was sufficient
enough to describe the horror of what happened.
This violence came from another world.
On August 9, 1945, The United States Government
committed another act of vaporized murder that came
from another world.
As of January 2016, the American people have no
idea that their government was responsible for
the horrors of an Auschwitz.
The only difference was that the murders happened
instantly, instead of over a period of several years.

During World
War II, the U.S. dropped 2,000,000 tons
of bombs.
In Indochina at least 8,000,000 tons were dropped.
This was equivalent to 640 Hiroshimas.
According to Howard Zinn, the United States was
responsible for 20 million bomb craters during the
Vietnam War.
I can’t imagine how many thousands of atrocities
went into making 20 million bomb craters?
They were My Lai’s from the skies.

The
United States Government has justified every
bomb, and every boot in every country in the
Middle East.
It absolutely has to.
The suffering is beyond comprehension.
It is worse than a firing squad ending the life of a
small child, because he was defending his country.
The U.S. economy is a life force that cannot survive
without war, and searching for enemies is the oil
that lubricates the illusion.
The American people are existing in a poverty of lies,
that is as frightening as the unstoppable release of
methane gas.
300 Lakota Sioux were murdered at Wounded Knee
on December 29, 1890, because there just weren’t
enough chairs around the Thanksgiving dinner table.
That has not changed.
Mike Hastie
Army Medic Vietnam
January 24, 2016

THE VIETNAM WAR PEACE MOVEMENT THEN AND NOW

Peace Movement History

The
PEACE MOVEMENT vs. the Vietnam War, Tom Hayden, Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement

“Truth, it is said, is war’s first casualty. Memory is its
second.” So writes the author, perfectly encapsulating his argument. By
Hayden’s account, the Vietnam experience is slowly being remade, courtesy of
conservative forces, into a just and blameless exercise in American goodwill.
In that program of revision, the anti-war movement is being written out of
history altogether. In this slender volume, the author charts how that movement
originated, informed by popular struggles for independence around the world and
for civil rights at home. He notes that, when it came to the early days of the
movement, nothing was prepackaged, so that he and other radical leaders had to
build their own set of arguments against “the dominant paradigm over our lives:
that the Cold War was necessary to stop monolithic international Communism from
knocking over the ‘dominoes’ of the Free World, one by one.” Hayden then
considers the anti-war movement in action, voicing passing regret at the
handful of protestors who chose to fly the Viet Cong flag. Against that tiny
number of misguided people, he writes, stands a much-overshadowing popular
movement, the first of its kind since McCarthyism, to halt an unjust war, one
that needs to be studied and revived today. Another regret in this lucid and
perfectly sized essay in reflection: that to some extent everyone might just as
well have stayed home, since, he notes on a trip to Vietnam, the streets of Ho
Chi Minh City and Hanoi are lined with the same shops as in Kansas City: “Why
kill, maim, and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer
wonderland approved by the country’s still-undefeated Communist Party?”

Movement-builders of today will want to take note of Hayden’s
thoughtful look back.

April
17, 1965, March on Washington, “then the
largest antiwar march in American history” (34)

“Public opinion turned against the war much
earlier than many historians concede” (35).
If you consider “emerging trends” rather than head counts, “the crucial time was March-May 1966, just after Arkansas senator William Fulbright
mesmerized the public with critical Senate hearings on Vietnam, faulting an
‘arrogance of power’ as the root cause.”

1968, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy ran for
president as peace candidates. “one
hundred peace candidates ran in twenty states.”
“There were forty-one cases of bombing and arson in the fall of 1968”
(37). President Johnson decided not to
run again. “Both the rank and file
activists in the peace movement and the peace candidates who arose from the
movement have to be considered together in weighing the immense impact
generated…between 1965 and 1968” (36).

November
1969, “National Moratorium was hailed
as the ‘largest peace march ever,’ with half a million gathering in Washington
alone” (34).

1972,
Shirley
Chisholm and George McGovern ran for president for peaceful resolution of the
war. “Thirty million” voted for George
McGovern, “a total inconceivable at the time of the first march only seven
years before.”

Hayden offers many more peace
movement milestones in chapter 2 on resisting and ending the war. --Dick

Comments on the Pentagon/Obama
(and now Trump) Commemoration. Sad that there would
be a campaign to whitewash the Vietnam War after all these years. The
truthtellers are particularly precious in these times of obfuscation. Frank Scheide.

A Book-Length Repudiation of the
Pentagon/Obama/(Trump) Commemoration of the Vietnam War.

On May 25,
2012, President Obama announced that
the United States would spend the next thirteen years—through November 11,
2025—commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American
soldiers, “more than 58,000 patriots,” who died in Vietnam. The fact that at
least 3 million Vietnamese—soldiers, parents, grandparents, children—also died
in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. U.S. history
barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being
displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of
devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for
this appalling disconnect of consciousness lies in an unremitting public
relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders,
business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying
the U.S. presence in Vietnam.

A devastating follow-up to
William L. Griffen and Marciano’s 1979 classic Teaching
the Vietnam War, The American War in Vietnam seeks
not to commemorate the Vietnam War, but to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual
history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the “Noble
Cause principle,” the notion that America is “chosen by God” to bring democracy
to the world. The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This
book will find a home in classrooms where teachers seek to do more than repeat
the trite glorifications of U.S. Empire. It will provide students everywhere
with insights that can prepare them to change the world.

Marciano has written a newer history of the war that provides
analysis and perspective on how the war ought to be remembered—and how it is
being misremembered and misused. I am eager to add it to my curriculum!

Marciano provides a deft overview of the American War in Vietnam
with all its deceits and horrors while demonstrating how the true history has
been sanitized and distorted in class-room history texts, thus depriving
younger generations a proper historical and political consciousness, making
them unable often to see through the flood of propaganda used to sell more
recent military interventions.

—Jeremy Kuzmarov, J.P. Walker assistant professor of history,
University of Tulsa; author of Modernizing Repression: Police
Training and Nation Building in the American Century and The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs

The American War in Vietnam pulls no punches in its
condemnation of America’s participation in the Vietnam War, citing both
outright war crimes (such as the notorious My Lai massacre) and the extensive
collateral damage and human suffering that the war inflicted. Author and
antiwar activist John Marciano (Professor Emeritus at SUNY Cortland) further
denounces the pervasive whitewashing of America’s purpose, role, and methods in
the Vietnam War. Notes, a bibliography, and an index round out this stark,
persuasive, and ferocious challenge to America’s status quo historical
narrative.

—Midwest Book Review

John’s book is now at the top of my list of recommended readings
for people planning to come to Viet Nam. The other is Huu Ngoc’s recently
released Viet Nam: Tradition and Change. Those books will give
visitors context and an accurate framework of Viet Nam’s past and
present—including the massive American shadow that we still cast here.

—Chuck Searcy, former U.S. Army intelligence specialist in
Vietnam; current International Advisor to Project RENEW, which works to
eliminate landmines and help Vietnamese families with consequences of Agent
Orange

John Marciano,
Professor Emeritus at SUNY Cortland, is an antiwar and social justice activist,
author, scholar, teacher, and trade unionist. He is also the author, with
William L. Griffen, of Teaching the Vietnam War (1979)
and Civic Illiteracy and Education: The Battle for the Hearts and
Minds of American Youth (1997). From 2004 through 2008, he
taught community courses for adults in Santa Monica, CA on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and Empire as a Way of Life, based on the work of William
Appleman Williams.